And, after all,
what is it in itself, when the gilt of its glamour is stripped, like
tinsel, from the fairy's pantomimic wand?
There is, when everything has been said, only one value in chastity
in its ideal sense, so long as we are tied to these conditions of
human instinct, and that is in the value that it brings to women.
Without it, a woman may be the essence of fascination; she may be
the completeness of attraction, but for the need of the race she is
undesirable. Without chastity, a woman may be most things to a man,
but she cannot be a mother to his child.
Amongst those girls, then, whose desire in life it is to marry,
conforming in all ways to the authority of convention, chastity has
been taught from the cradle--taught as a means to an end. It is mostly,
if not altogether, in the lower middle classes that you will find
chastity to be an end in itself. The destructive philosophy of
education has not swept out the gentler virtues from them. As yet
they have not come under the keen edge of its influence. For their
chastity, then, they are interesting; whereas the manufactured
virtue of the upper middle class is like the hothouse
strawberry--forced in May--a tempting fruit to lay upon a dish, but
tasteless, as is wool, between the teeth.
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